Today, there is great interest in the personalization and customization of images as a way to add value to documents. This is especially true in transactional and promotional marketing applications, but is gaining traction in more image intensive markets such as photo finishing, whereby personalized calendars, photobooks, greeting cards, and the likes are created. Several technologies currently exist to personalize images such as XMPie, DirectSmile, and AlphaPictures, for example.
One form of image personalization incorporates variable text into a fixed image in a natural way. One of the main challenges in incorporating text into an image is to estimate the 3D geometric properties of the surface on which the text is to be rendered. Existing tools handle the problem by presenting via a GUI a 2D text grid that can be overlaid on the image and locally warped in 2-dimensions to appear to fit onto the 3D object surface.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/340,103 presents a semi-automatic method and system for determining 3D geometry of a planar surface within the image, and inserting or replacing text on that planar surface, in which a pinhole camera model is assumed. With this model, planar surface geometry is uniquely determined via the knowledge of two vanishing points obtained from mutually perpendicular convergent lines that are parallel in the 3D scene. The problem then translates to determining the orientation of the pairs of parallel lines. This task can be done fairly readily by a user. However in order to increase the level of automation of the algorithm, or equivalently, to reduce the burden on the part of the user, it is desirable to have a fully automatic technique to identify pairs of parallel lines in the image.
What are therefore needed are convenient and easy-to-use systems and methods to automatically identify sets of parallel lines that help define regions and surface geometry in an image for insertion of personalized text into the image in a natural and less restrictive manner.